Web 2.0 Expo Blog » 2011

Leading online real estate database Zillow.com has a thriving mobile strategy: People use its apps 6.5 million times each month “with more than 23 million visits to home detail pages; that’s 32,000 home views every hour or nearly 9 home views every single second,” says CEO Spencer Rascoff.

To hit these impressive numbers, Zillow has worked hard to re-imagine its business model for a mobile audience, for both consumers and advertisers.

spencer_rascoff Spencer will give a keynote (Redefining Zillow in a Mobile Era: When a dot com is No Longer a .com) this March at Web 2.0 Expo in which he’ll discuss how his company transformed.

We recently interviewed Spencer about Zillow’s success and how companies can develop their own location-based mobile technology strategies. Read on for the full interview:

Kaitlin: Your talk focuses in part on the impact of location-based mobile technologies has had on your company. Can you give me an overview of what changed and why you felt this was necessary?

Spencer: We live in a mobile society. People expect tools that can interact with their digital lives and that respond in fundamentally new ways.

We see real estate as a perfect location-based application for mobile – people want this information as they are walking and driving around neighborhoods. We saw this immediately in our mobile usage the first day we launched our first mobile app on iPhone two years ago. Continue Reading »

Maybe you’ve heard of this so-called “mobile trend” in the Web 2.0 space. If you’re only vaguely familiar with what’s going on, let me (actually, Mary Meeker) blow your mind with these slides.

KPCB Top 10 Mobile Trends

Or if you just want a few interesting details on why you should care

Global mobile traffic should grow 26x current rates over the next 5 years
40% of all tweets come from mobile devices
50% of all Pandora users subscribe on mobile
Spotify’s introduction of a mobile product drove 2x conversion ratio from free to paying subscribers
Pricing on devices and data plans are falling, creating more customers

melissa-clark Long story short, your company should focus more effort on the mobile space if you haven’t already. Luckily, Web 2.0 Expo speaker Melissa Clark (Siteworx, Inc.) is here to help you move your company along. In her session How Mobile-Friendly Is Your Organization’s Website?, Melissa will focus on how you can create a great mobile site, how to improve UX, and how to maintain brand consistency in the mobile space all while giving the audience great case studies on how it’s done right.

We recently spoke with Melissa about her upcoming session and what her audience can expect to learn. Read the full interview below for more. Continue Reading »

If your startup doesn’t know how to talk to users (and get the most out of those discussions), you could miss out on exactly what your customers want you to know.

laura-klein Web 2.0 Expo speaker Laura Klein (Users Know) regularly consults with lean startups and other small companies on usability research, and shows them how they can use this valuable information to improve their business.

In her upcoming session Who Do I Talk To Now? User Research for Every Phase of Your Product, Laura will discuss the most common types of usability research, what types of conversations to have with different sets of customers, how this changes as your product matures, and tips on how to avoid some of the common mistakes startups stumble on. We recently talked with Laura about her session and user research.

Read on for the full interview:

Kaitlin: The basic problem your session goes after is how can a startup (which by nature has very limited resources) better “talk” to their customers, specifically with usability research. Without letting the cat out of the bag too much, can you list a few of the types of usability research your session covers and why they’re important?

Laura: Over the past couple of years, dozens of new products have been released that claim to help make user research faster and easier. The problem is that most people don’t know which ones to use or how to get the most out of them.

A large part of what I cover in my session is how to use things like remote usability, unmoderated testing, and micro usability tests to make gathering qualitative feedback much faster. I’ll also talk about which methods give you the best results for the different stages of your product. Continue Reading »

If you’re building an app or service that needs good, structured data at reasonable terms, you’re probably having a bit of a rough go.

Your problems likely include 1) not being able to find the right vendor, 2) not having enough usable data when you find a source 3) dealing with complex T&Cs and 4) no great way to keep it fresh and updated.

Fortunately, companies such as Factual - founded by Applied Semantics co-founder and Web 2.0 Expo speaker Gil Elbaz – are tackling these tough issues by building data services and components.

We recently spoke to Gil about this problem/solution, as well as about his upcoming Web 2.0 Expo session Facing the Big Data Challenge – Getting Some.

gil-elbaz In our interview with Gil, we covered

Factual’s role and future in Big Data
What innovative approaches companies are taking with data
Disrupting traditional data companies
How to structure and clean data with fewer humans involved
How to think about data rights in a complex ecosystem

Listen to the full interview for more.

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Kaitlin Pike is the Web 2.0 Expo community manager. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike. To see Gil speak, register for Web 2.0 Expo SF now with discount code websf11bl20 to save 20%.

Why aren’t more customers using your product? Maybe it’s because your brand’s story isn’t making them happy enough.

jennifer-lynn-aaker1 Web 2.0 Expo speaker and Stanford Professor Jennifer Lynn Aaker is a social psychologist and marketer who studies, among other areas, happiness. (She answers such questions as “What actually makes people happy, as opposed to what they think make them happy?”) And as you can learn more about in her book, she also focuses on using social media to drive social change.

In her keynote address this March, Creating Infectious Action, she’ll discuss how you can connect meaning to your social media campaigns to create impact as well as why some brands who harness social media take off when others don’t.

I recently interviewed Jennifer about her talk, including what makes people happy and how her research can help brands create more effective marketing campaigns and stories.

Kaitlin: I see and hear a lot of unhappiness and complaints about not being happy enough in our culture. Why aren’t we (Americans) all happy all the time? We have Disneyland AND the iPhone now. What went wrong?

Jennifer: Our understanding of what happiness is (and how to get it) is often misaligned with what really drives happiness. (For two excellent books on the subject, see “How of Happiness” and “Stumbling on Happiness”.) Our society’s prevalent belief is that money and status will make us happy (or we behave as if they will). The reality, however, is that the link between money and happiness is tenuous. Take the striking evidence that although income has steadily increased over the past fifty years in the United States, life satisfaction has remained relatively flat. Research shows that for those who earn more than $75,000 (the number varies depending where you live), additional money does surprisingly little to increase life enjoyment, stave off sadness, or reduce stress. Once your basic needs are met, the correlation between money and happiness or satisfaction is relatively low.

So our behavior patterns are often misaligned with being happy in the long run. Continue Reading »

Facebook earned nearly $2 billion dollars in advertising revenue for 2010, and some estimate this will grow to $4 billion for 2011. While it may be clear why advertisers are throwing money at the social network en masse (uh, their audiences are there), it’s not always clear how you – the individual advertiser – can make the greatest impact with your campaign and maximize your brand.

justin-kistner Web 2.0 Expo speaker Justin Kistner (Webtrends), along with co-presenter Dennis Yu (BlitzLocal), covers just this subject in two presentations this March: their workshop Effective Facebook Ads and Applications, and session Supercharging Your Brand on Facebook.

“Most of the conversation around social media marketing has been focused on more of the organic side of social,” Justin said. “But now what’s clearly emerging is a paid approach to social media marketing. It’s a very different discipline.

“Our session is going to go into a lot of those details not only just explaining the theory but also then getting into showing actual customer examples and sharing practices and insights that we’ve been able to gather from all the work that we’ve been doing.”

Justin and Dennis will look at the elements of effective advertising and share benchmarks, not just the creative executions. (For a look at some of the Facebook trends Justin studied, see his blog post on Webtrends.)

Why People Become Fans

In his research, Justin found a recurring trend of what people look for when deciding whether to become a fan of a brand’s page.

“Very strongly the message was ‘We became a fan because we wanted to be treated special in some way by the brand.’ be that they got exclusive offers or early access to information or exclusive content,” he said.

“A lot of the same things that we sign up for lists for are what we are hoping to get out of our relationship with a brand on Facebook. Now the goal is giving your customers, your fans, all that stuff: driving those offer campaigns and that exclusive content or early access to things, giving them that VIP treatment.” Continue Reading »

Web 2.0 Expo Speaker Scott Porad believes new developers should write and commit code to production software on day one, before they’re even given the chance to set up and get cozy in their desks.

As CTO of Cheezburger, Inc. (the company behind i can has cheezburger? and Fail Blog), Scott has a key role in hiring and directing how developers are trained. Last fall he wrote a somewhat controversial post on his blog about his hiring and training practices. (Allow me to kill the controversy here: New employees actually do get shown the bathroom.) Boiled down, his philosophy revolves around making employees and the team happy:

scott-porad3 “Developers are probably like most employees in every job which is when you’re happy and excited and engaged with what you’re doing, you’re a 100 times more creative and productive and successful than if you come in and are trudging away stamping out widgets every day,” Scott said.

Because he received such immense feedback from the community about his post, he’s coming to Web 2.0 Expo this spring to hold a session based in part on it: We Don’t Show New Employees the Bathroom Until They’ve Checked In Code.

Scott recently spoke with us about his upcoming session as well as

His team building philosophy
Why teams with better social skills work better together
The technical challenges of running Cheezburger, Inc.’s sites
What Cheezburger, Inc. has planned for the future
Eating M&M’s with chopsticks
His favorite Internet meme
Does everyone at Cheezburger, Inc. speak like an LOL Cat?

Check out the full interview for more!

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Kaitlin Pike is the Web 2.0 Expo community manager. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike. To see Scott speak, register for Web 2.0 Expo SF now with discount code websf11bl20 to save 20%.

The startup scene includes a good number of non-technical people whose skills are a vital component of most web companies. But creating a web business with only non-techies? That’s not something you think about every day, unless you’re LaunchBit co-founder Elizabeth Yin.

elizabeth-yin Elizabeth and co-founder Jennifer Chin believe anyone can launch an Internet-based business, even if they don’t know how to code. In their workshop at Web 2.0 Expo San Francico (Get Going: How to Build and Test Your Idea Without Programming), Elizabeth and Jennifer will provide attendees with specific methodology and tools for testing and starting a business. After coming to their workshop, attendees will know how to launch a business idea without coding anything, how to market it, and how to measure early-stage success.

Elizabeth recently spoke with us about her session, starting an Internet business without coding, and customer development. Read on for more.

Kaitlin: The basis for your session surprised me: How to start a web based business without knowing how to program. At first read, I thought that was similar to “how to open a bakery without knowing how to bake.” Can you give me your elevator pitch defending your workshop idea?

Elizabeth: These days, for most internet businesses, the number one challenge is customer acquisition and marketing — not in building a website. There are obviously exceptions to this, but the overwhelming majority of startups that fail don’t fail because their website didn’t work. They fail because not enough people used it. This means that as entrepreneurs, we need to do a better job of vetting our markets before even building anything. That’s what this workshop is all about — how to do this. My co-founder Jennifer and I developed this methodology for our own profitable sites, even though we’re developers ourselves. We came up with this methodology out of necessity, because prior to working with Jennifer, I had a startup that failed — I wasted almost 2 years and about $20k of my own personal savings by not vetting my market. Continue Reading »

This year for the first time at Web 2.0 Expo SF, we’re hosting Startup Showcase. It was a huge hit at Expo NY 2010 (here’s the video of part of it), and we expect it to explode in SF. Highlighting the startup ecosystem’s creativity and variety, the Showcase gives you a chance to get in front of hundreds of potential users and a couple of high-profile investors. On Tuesday night, March 29th, we’re going to have 30 startups demoing in one large room. We’ll provide you with a small table and two passes to get into the show—you’ll bring a laptop (or two) and a founder (or two).

Expo attendees will have 60 minutes to see your demos. As they walk around, attendees will vote on their favorite demos. At the end of the hour, Tim O’Reilly and Ann Winblad will announce their top four picks and the audience favorite. These five startups will each give a one-minute pitch to the audience and will have a short time onstage to get feedback from Tim and Ann.

How do you qualify? We’re looking for:

Relatively young startups that aren’t drowning in investment (yet)
Companies in all technology areas: hardware, software, B2B, B2C, mobile (just to name the most obvious categories)

If selected:

You’ll supply your own laptop for the demos (we won’t provide power, so we recommend bringing two laptops)
You’ll bring a maximum of two people (at least one of whom must be a founder or C-level equivalent; ideally, one of them would also be a woman)
The week prior to the event, you’ll supply us with a presentation of 2-4 slides that includes screenshots for your onstage pitch in case you are selected by Tim and Ann

If you’re among the five winners, you’ll give a one-minute pitch onstage and get direct feedback from Tim and Ann.

Apply Now.

Today we’re proud to announce the list of participating non-profits in our third annual Non-Profit Pavilion. These non-profits will be featured as exhibitors and given booth space in the Web 2.0 Expo show floor alongside our other exhibitors and sponsors.

A committee of Web 2.0 Expo influencers selected the following nonprofits based on how each uses Web 2.0 tools and technologies in their work. Each organization will be supplied with booth space, on-site branding, an Internet connection, and inclusion in the online and printed events guide, completely free of charge.

ACLU of Northern California